by Jim Butcher
The piece of coral didn’t explode. There was a whispering sound, and hundreds of tiny holes appeared in the bloodstained walls and ceiling. Gard let out a pained grunt. My left calf jerked as something pierced it and burned as though the wound had been filled with salt.
I checked Hendricks. One side of his face was covered in a sheet of blood. Small tears were visible in his leathers, and he was beginning to bleed through the holes.
“Get him,” I said to Gard, rising, as another coral spheroid rose into the air.
Before it could get close enough to be a threat, I blew it to powder with my shotgun. And the next and the next, while Gard dropped her rifle, got a shoulder under one of Hendricks’s, and helped him to his feet as if he’d been her weight instead of two hundred and seventy pounds of muscle. She started down the stairs.
A fourth sphere came accompanied by mocking laughter, and when I pulled the trigger again, the weapon didn’t function. Empty. I slapped the coral device out of the air with the shotgun’s barrel and flung myself backward, hoping to clear the level of the floor on the stairwell before the pseudo-grenade detonated. I did not quite make it. Several objects struck my chest and arms, and a hot blade slipped across my unscarred ear, but the armor turned the truly dangerous projectiles.
I broke my arm tumbling backward down the stairs.
More laughter followed me down, but at least the fomor wasn’t spouting some kind of ridiculous monologue.
“I did my best,” came Mag’s voice. “I gave you a chance to return what was mine. But no. You couldn’t keep yourself from interfering in my affairs, from stealing my property. And so now you will reap the consequences of your foolishness, little mortal. . . .”
There was more, but there is hardly a need to go into details. Given a choice between that egocentric drivel and a broken arm, I prefer the latter. It’s considerably less excruciating.
Gard hauled me to my feet by my coat with her spare hand. I got under the stunned Hendricks’s other arm and helped them both down the rest of the stairs. Justine stood in the doorway of the safe room, at the end of the hallway of flickering lights, her face white-lipped but calm.
Gard helped me get Hendricks to the door of the room and turned around. “Close the door. I may be able to discourage him out here.”
“Your home office would be annoyed with me if I wasted your life on such a low-percentage proposition,” I said. “We stick to the plan.”
The valkyrie eyed me. “Your arm is broken.”
“I was aware, thank you,” I said. “Is there any reason the countermeasure shouldn’t work?”
Mag was going on about something, coming down the steps one at a time, making a production of every footfall. I ignored the ass.
“None that I know of,” Gard admitted. “Which is not the same answer as ‘no.’ ”
“Sir,” Justine said.
“We planned for this—or something very like it. We don’t split up now. End of discussion. Help me with Hendricks.”
“Sir,” Justine said.
I looked up to see Mag standing on the landing, cloaked in random shadows, smiling. The emergency lights on the stairwell blew out with a melodramatic shower of dying sparks.
“Ah,” I said. I reached inside the safe-room door, found the purely mechanical pull-cord wrapped unobtrusively around a nail head on the wall, and gave it a sharp jerk.
It set off the antipersonnel mines built into the wall of the landing.
There were four of them, which meant that a wash of fire and just under three-thousand-round shot acquainted themselves with the immediate vicinity of the landing and with Mag. A cloud of flame and flying steel enveloped the fomor, but at the last instant the swirling blackness around him rose up like a living thing, forming a shield between Mag and the oncoming flood of destruction.
The sound of the explosions was so loud that it demolished my hearing for a moment. It began to return to me as the cloud of smoke and dust on the landing began to clear. I could hear a fire alarm going off.
Mag, smudged and blackened with residue but otherwise untouched, made an irritated gesture, and the fire alarm sparked and fizzled—but not before setting off the automatic sprinklers. Water began pouring down from spigots in the ceiling.
Mag looked up at the water and then down at me, and his too-wide smile widened even more. “Really?” he asked. “Water? Did you actually think water would be a barrier to the magic of a fomor lord?”
Running water was highly detrimental to mortal magic, or so Gard informed me, whether it was naturally occurring or not. The important element was quantity. Enough water would ground magic just as it could conduct electricity and short-circuit electronics. Evidently Mag played by different rules.
Mag made a point to continue down the stairs at exactly the same pace. He was somewhat hampered in that several of the stairs had been torn up rather badly in the explosion, but he made it to the hallway. Gard took up a position in the middle of the hallway, her axe held straight up beside her in both arms like a baseball player’s bat.
I helped Hendricks into the safe room and dumped him on a bunk, out of any line of fire from the hallway. Justine took one look at his face and hurried over to the medical station, where she grabbed a first-aid kit. She rushed back to Hendricks’s side. She broke open the kit and started laying out the proper gear for getting a clear look at a bloody wound and getting the bleeding stopped. Her hands flew with precise speed. She’d had some form of training.
From the opposite bunk, the child watched Justine with wide blue eyes. She was naked and had been crying. The tears were still on her little cheeks. Even now, her lower lip had begun to tremble.
But so far as anyone else knew, I was made of stone.
I turned and crossed the room. I sat down at the desk, a copy of the one in my main office. I put my handgun squarely in front of me. The desk was positioned directly in line with the door to the panic room. From behind the desk, I could see the entire hallway clearly.
Mag stepped forward and moved a hand as though throwing something. I saw nothing, but Gard raised her axe in a blocking movement, and there was a flash of light, and the image of a Norse rune, or something like it, was burned onto my retina. The outer edge of Gard’s mail sleeve on her right arm abruptly turned black and fell to dust, so that the sleeve split and dangled open.
Gard took a grim step back as Mag narrowed his jaundiced eyes and lifted the crooked stick. Something that looked like the blend of a lightning bolt and an eel lashed through the air toward Gard, but she caught it on the broad blade of her axe, and there was another flash of light, another eye-searing rune. I heard her cry out, though, and saw that the edges of her fingernails had been burned black.
Step by step she fell back, while Mag hammered at her with things that made no sense, many of which I could not even see. Each time, the rune-magic of that axe defeated the attack—and each time, it seemed to cost her something. A lightly singed face here. A long, shallow cut upon her newly bared arm there. And the runes, I saw, were each in different places on the axe, being burned out one by one. Gard had a finite number of them.
As Gard’s heels touched the threshold of the safe room, Mag let out a howl and threw both hands out ahead of him. An unseen force lifted Gard from her feet and flung her violently across the room, over my desk, and into the wall. She hit with bone-crushing force and slid down limply.
I faced the inhuman sorcerer alone.
Mag walked slowly and confidently into my safe room and stared at me across my desk. He was breathing heavily, from exertion or excitement or both. He smiled, slowly, and waved his hand again. An unpleasant shimmer went through the air, and I glanced down to see rust forming on the exposed metal of my gun, while cracking began to spread through the plastic grip.
“Go ahead, mortal,” Mag said, drawing out the words. “Pick up the gun. Try it. The crafting of the weapon is fine, mortal, but you are not the masters of the world that you believe yourselves to be. Even tod
ay’s cleverest smiths are no match for the magic of the fomor.”
I inclined my head in agreement. “Then I suppose,” I said, “that we’ll just have to do this old school.”
I drew the eighteenth-century German dragoon pistol from the open drawer beside my left hand, aimed, and fired. The ancient flintlock snapped forward, ignited the powder in the pan, and roared, a wash of unnatural blue white fire blazing forth from the antique weapon. I almost fancied that I could see the bullet, spinning and tumbling, blazing with its own tiny rune.
Though Mag’s shadows leapt up to defend him, he had expended enormous energy moving through the building, hurling attack after attack at us. More energy had to be used to overcome the tremendous force of the claymores that had exploded virtually in his face. Perhaps, at his full strength, at the height of his endurance, his powers would have been enough to turn even the single, potent attack that had been designed to defeat them.
From the beginning, the plan had been to wear him down.
The blue bolt of lead and power from the heavy old flintlock pierced Mag’s defenses and body in the same instant and with the same contemptuous energy.
Mag blinked at me, then lowered his head to goggle at the smoking hole in his chest as wide as my thumb. His mouth moved as he tried to gabble something, but no sound came out.
“Idiot,” I said coldly. “It will be well worth the weregild to be rid of you.”
Mag lurched toward me for a moment, intent upon saying something, but the fates spared me from having to endure any more of him. He collapsed to the floor before he could finish speaking.
I eyed my modern pistol, crusted with rust and residue, and decided not to try it. I kept a spare .45 in the downstairs desk in any case. I took it from another drawer, checked it awkwardly one-handed, and then emptied the weapon into Mag’s head and chest.
I am the one who taught Hendricks to be thorough.
I looked up from Mag’s ruined form to find Justine staring at me, frozen in the middle of wrapping a bandage around my second’s head.
“How is he?” I asked calmly.
Justine swallowed. She said, “He m-may need stitches for this scalp wound. I think he has a concussion. The other wounds aren’t bad. His armor stopped most of the fragments from going in.”
“Gard?” I asked without looking over my shoulder. The valkyrie had an incredible ability to resist and recover from injury.
“Be sore for a while,” she said, the words slurred. “Give me a few minutes.”
“Justine, perhaps you will set my arm and splint it,” I said. “We will need to abandon this renovation, I’m afraid, Gard. Where’s the thermite?”
“In your upstairs office closet, right where you left it,” she said in a very slightly aggrieved tone.
“Be a dear and burn down the building,” I said.
She appeared beside my desk, looking bruised, exhausted, and functional. She lifted both eyebrows. “Was that a joke?”
“Apparently,” I said. “Doubtless the result of triumph and adrenaline.”
“My word,” she said. She looked startled.
“Get moving,” I told her. “Make the fire look accidental. I need to contact the young lady’s patron so that she can be delivered safely back into her hands. Call Dr. Schulman as well. Tell him that Mr. Hendricks and I will be visiting him shortly.” I pursed my lips. “And steak, I think. I could use a good steak. The Pump Room should do for the three of us, eh? Ask them to stay open an extra half an hour.”
Gard showed me her teeth in a flash. “Well,” she said, “it’s no mead hall. But it will do.”
I put my house in order. In the end, it took less than half an hour. The troubleshooters made sure the fomorian creatures were dragged inside, then vanished. Mag’s body had been bagged and transferred, to be returned to his watery kin, along with approximately a quarter of a million dollars in bullion, the price required in the Accords for the weregild of a person of Mag’s stature.
Justine was ready to meet a car that was coming to pick her up, and Hendricks was already on the way to Schulman’s attentions. He’d seemed fine by the time he left, growling at Gard as she fussed over him.
I looked around the office and nodded. “We know the defense plan has some merit,” I said. I hefted the dragoon pistol. “I’ll need more of those bullets.”
“I was unconscious for three weeks after scribing the rune for that one,” Gard replied. “To say nothing of the fact that the bullets themselves are rare. That one killed a man named Nelson at Trafalgar.”
“How do you know?”
“I took it out of him,” she said. “Men of his caliber are few and far between. I’ll see what I can do.” She glanced at Justine. “Sir?”
“Not just yet,” I said. “I will speak with her alone for a moment, please.”
She nodded, giving Justine a look that was equal parts curiosity and warning. Then she departed.
I got up and walked over to the girl. She was holding the child against her again. The little girl had dropped into an exhausted sleep.
“So,” I said quietly. “Lara Raith sent you to Mag’s people. He happened to abduct you. You happened to escape from him—despite the fact that he seemed to be holding other prisoners perfectly adequately—and you left carrying the child. And, upon emerging from Lake Michigan, you happened to be nearby, so you came straight here.”
“Yes,” Justine said quietly.
“Coincidences, coincidences,” I said. “Put the child down.”
Her eyes widened in alarm.
I stared at her until she obeyed.
My right arm was splinted and in a sling. With my left hand, I reached out and flipped open her suit jacket, over her left hip, where she’d been clutching the child all evening.
There was an envelope in a plastic bag protruding from the jacket’s interior pocket. I took it.
She made a small sound of protest and aborted it partway.
I opened the bag and the envelope and scanned over the paper inside.
“These are account numbers,” I said quietly. “Security passwords. Stolen from Mag’s home, I suppose?”
She looked up at me with very wide eyes.
“Dear child,” I said, “I am a criminal. One very good way to cover up one crime is to commit another, more obvious one.” I glanced down at the sleeping child again. “Using a child to cover your part of the scheme. Quite cold-blooded, Justine.”
“I freed all of Mag’s prisoners to cover up the theft of his records at my lady’s bidding,” she said quietly. “The child was . . . not part of the plan.”
“Children frequently aren’t,” I said.
“I took her out on my own,” she said. “She’s free of that place. She will stay that way.”
“To be raised among the vampires?” I asked. “Such a lovely child will surely go far.”
Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her own. I couldn’t leave her.”
I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural into hiding. I do not recommend you mention my name as a reference, but perhaps he could be convinced to help the child.”
She blinked at me, several times. Then she said quietly, “You, sir, are not very much like I thought you were.”
“Nor are you. Agent Justine.” I took a deep breath and regarded the child again. “At least we accomplished something today.” I smiled at Justine. “Your ride should be here by now. You may go.”
She opened her mouth and reached for the envelope.
I slipped it into my pocket. “Do give Lara my regards. And tell her that the next time she sends you out to steal honey, she should find someone else to kill the bees.” I gave her a faint smile. “That will be all.”
Justine looked at me. Then her lips quivered up into a tiny, amused smile. She bowed
her head to me, collected the child, and walked out, her steps light.
I debated putting a bullet in her head but decided against it. She had information about my defenses that could leave them vulnerable—and more to the point, she knew that they were effective. If she should speak of today’s events to Dresden . . .
Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the running water, and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place to counter Mag or his odd folk at all.
They were there to kill Harry Dresden.
And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses in the new location.
Besides, the young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.
I would test myself against Dresden in earnest one day—or he against me. Until then, I had to gather as many resources to myself as possible. And when the day of reckoning came, I had to make sure it happened in a place where, despite his powers, he would no longer have the upper hand.
Like everything else.
Location, location, location.